Frottage and Analogue Digital Archaeology

As we get closer to another return to Eddington in Cambridge for Prospection, I realise I never mentioned what I did last year.

I have always shied away from making in my creative archaeology, I think because I’m worried that people will think I’m trying to make art and that it won’t be good art. But I’m a lot more confident in my creative archaeology now and happy that work that looks like bad art can still be good archaeology!

Before last year’s visit to Eddington I was amazed to see that on Google Maps, where Eddington still appears as a building site despite its many residents, there was a single panoramic photo in its central market square, taken on an open day. Panning around, I found a foot and some glitchy image mapping.

Paul Mansfield’s foot, 2017

I decided that I would like to mark this first widely accessible digital incursion onto the site by creating an analogue copy for our archive.

Arriving at Eddington, I found the exact spot of Mansfield’s foot and set to work with a graphite stick and long rice paper scrolls, with invaluable help holding it all down from Yasuyuki Yoshida.

Analogue digital archaeology, 2017. photo by Yasuyuki Yoshida

Completed in about 30 mins, the result is this c 1.5 x 1.5 m rubbing of Paul Mansfield’s Google Maps photo, ready to enter the Cambridge city archive as a record of that first publicly sourced, geo-located digital image of the site.